Wednesday, 21 June

DAY 3, WEDNESDAY, 21 JUNE

PLACE JOHN PAUL II (OPEN AIR)

18.00

ALMA ENSEMBLE OPENING CONCERT

The music group well known from the Minimax Children’s Channel will treat the get-together with music and dance in an improvised manner during this 1-hour family concert: children as well as parents and teachers play active roles in this programme spiced with lots of fun. The key to their success is honesty touching children’s soul and their ability to get ‘laughing’ and ‘dancing’ muscles move. In addition to their own compositions, the group has recited melodised poems by classical and contemporary poets for 20 years.

Oscar and Viola are the heroes of the bitter-sweet story jointly produced by VÁGI Bence and Neil FISHER. We tend to think clowns equal laughter. Recirquel have already added nuance to this image with one of their productions, and now they go further as they weave the expressive means of contemporary circus into the story of two persons&#39; life. In the magical world of Viola and Oscar, everything turns on its head, even time: the last day of their shared life and the moment when love is born is a single inner journey into memories. Starting in the Budapest of the 1950s, the sentimental story guides the viewer through the decades the couple spent together: through the dark times of the world wars, we arrive in the 1910s. And as we take stock of the moments they shared, the two characters and their far- from-common surroundings keep changing. The scene for the unusual events is the roomy flat that fills with objects and memories in the course of the years - a place where everything is very familiar yet nothing may be what it seems...

„Man has a mind so he can liberate himself, thus he must set himself free. Why wouldn’t someone put out the candle, when he has nothing to look at any longer, when everything is so hateful to see? But how?(…) A freight train arrived exactly at that time…”

The enchanting Anna Karenina is an esteemed member of society. She has everything a woman could want: a high ranking husband, a child and respect. But on a fateful day she meets a handsome army officer with a glorious career in front of him: Vronsky. At this time she didn’t realize yet, but from this moment on her life would never be the same as it had been before. After finishing War and Peace, in 1873 Lev Tolstoy started writing his second great novel, Anna Karenina, about which he wrote in his letter written to Nikolay Strahov: - “this novel is the first real novel of my life, it has completely captivated my heart...” We also know from Tolstoy’s correspondence that the idea of writing a novel about a tragic experience was conceived in him under the impression of Pushkin’s writings: in 1872 he witnessed as a young woman threw herself in front of a freight train in her jealous rage. Tolstoy was depressed for a long time by the sight of the dead, mangled woman. He revised the novel eleven times before the final version was born, which elevated Anna to among the greatest heroes of literature, and which – in the words of Thomas MANN – was the “greatest societal novel of all times”.

Human emotions and their motivators are always in the focus of the performances by Harangozó award winning choreographer, VELEKEI László. He touches Tolstoy’s extensive novel through this filter as well: by stripping the plot he places the emphasis on the two main characters, Anna and Vronsky, in a way that he breaks away from the chronology of the story in the meantime.